Students who are interested in learning about the environment should not be dissuaded from doing so but only if they have proved their proficiency in other basic courses such as U.S. history. Until then we need to focus on producing well-educated citizens steeped in their country's history and mindful of their civic responsibilities.
Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.
People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals robotics artificial intelligence nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on based on preliminary successes.